Lawn Boy

For Mike Muñoz, a young Chicano living in Washington State, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work—and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew—he knows that he’s got to be the one to shake things up if he’s ever going to change his life. But how?

In this funny, angry, touching, and ultimately deeply inspiring novel, bestselling author Jonathan Evison takes the reader into the heart and mind of a young man on a journey to discover himself, a search to find the secret to achieving the American dream of happiness and prosperity. That’s the birthright for all Americans, isn’t it? If so, then what is Mike Muñoz’s problem? Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can’t seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it. And it’s looking really good.

Lawn Boy is an important, entertaining, and completely winning novel about social class distinctions, about overcoming cultural discrimination, and about standing up for oneself.

Trigger warnings: homophobic language, sexual content, language, drug abuse, alcohol use

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars

This was the strangest book I have read in a long while, but I think I liked it. Mike is just trying to figure himself out. Through the changing jobs and the people who are drifting in and out of his life, I was beginning to wonder about the choices he was making. Then I started to see him become more sure in his own decisions and understood. This isn't about the decisions I would make, but about him becoming the man he was supposed to be. I love how supportive his family is, how much his friend comes beside and supports him (even if he is a real homo-phobe a**hole). I just love teh realness of this story.

Some of my favorite quotes, these are scattered through the book - percent of the way through shown in parenthesis after the quotes, if you are interested:

  

At this point, I feel like I’m nothing more than what everybody needs me to be or whatever the situation demands of me. (3%)

That’s what kids should do, they should laugh. If there’s a better, righter sound in the whole world than the laughter of children, I don’t know what it is. (5%)

I’ve come to believe that to a large degree we are products of our environment. (10%)

No matter how deep the infection runs, family is family. The only other choice is to cut them off like rotten limbs. (31%)

the moments are fleeting, like my mom’s smile, and it’s not often we have control over them, and that just makes them all the sweeter. (39%) 

when the questions become too numerous and the considerations begin to feel a little overwhelming, you just have to look away for a minute and regather your vision for the thing, try to see it the way it originally came to you. Ask yourself, how did I arrive here? What was I trying to accomplish? (90%)

So, whoever you are, whatever your last name is, wherever you came from, whichever way you swing, whatever is standing in your way, just remember: you’re bigger than that. Like the man said: you contain multitudes. (90%)

The Paradox Hotel

An impossible crime. A detective on the edge of madness. The future of time travel at stake.

January Cole’s job just got a whole lot harder.

Not that running security at the Paradox was ever really easy. Nothing’s simple at a hotel where the ultra-wealthy tourists arrive costumed for a dozen different time periods, all eagerly waiting to catch their “flights” to the past.

Or where proximity to the timeport makes the clocks run backward on occasion—and, rumor has it, allows ghosts to stroll the halls.

None of that compares to the corpse in room 526. The one that seems to be both there and not there. The one that somehow only January can see.

On top of that, some very important new guests have just checked in. Because the U.S. government is about to privatize time-travel technology—and the world’s most powerful people are on hand to stake their claims.

January is sure the timing isn’t a coincidence. Neither are those “accidents” that start stalking their bidders.

There’s a reason January can glimpse what others can’t. A reason why she’s the only one who can catch a killer who’s operating invisibly and in plain sight, all at once.

But her ability is also destroying her grip on reality—and as her past, present, and future collide, she finds herself confronting not just the hotel’s dark secrets but her own.

I think if I would have read this book instead of listening to it, I might have enjoyed it more but I got a little confused. What I did enjoy was the main character January. There were times that her reactions and the way that she handled things just make me laugh or at least smile. Loved the ending of this book though. <3 

Leah on the Offbeat

TW: Body shaming, moderate cursing, racism, fat-phobia, homophobia and minor alcohol consumption. 

Leah Burke—girl-band drummer, master of deadpan, and Simon Spier’s best friend from the award-winning Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda—takes center stage in this novel of first love and senior-year angst.

When it comes to drumming, Leah Burke is usually on beat—but real life isn’t always so rhythmic. An anomaly in her friend group, she’s the only child of a young, single mom, and her life is decidedly less privileged. She loves to draw but is too self-conscious to show it. And even though her mom knows she’s bisexual, she hasn’t mustered the courage to tell her friends—not even her openly gay BFF, Simon.

So Leah really doesn’t know what to do when her rock-solid friend group starts to fracture in unexpected ways. With prom and college on the horizon, tensions are running high. It’s hard for Leah to strike the right note while the people she loves are fighting—especially when she realizes she might love one of them more than she ever intended.

I thought this was a fun book. I loved Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda and this book just gave me the opportunity to get to know the characters better. This time the focus is on Leah. Leah is (as described by the author) An anomaly in her friend group, she’s the only child of a young, single mom, and her life is decidedly less privileged. She loves to draw but is too self-conscious to show it. And even though her mom knows she’s bisexual, she hasn’t mustered the courage to tell her friends—not even her openly gay BFF, Simon

Gave this one three stars on goodreads. 

Little Girls Sleeping

He looked down at the little girl, sleeping peacefully, her arms wrapped around a teddy bear. He knew he was the only one who could save her. He could let her sleep forever.

An eight-year-old girl, Chelsea Compton, is missing in Pine Valley, California and for Detective Katie Scott it’s a cruel reminder of the friend who disappeared from summer camp twenty years ago. Unable to shake the memories, Katie vows she won’t rest until she discovers what happened to Chelsea.

But as Katie starts to investigate, the case reveals itself to be much bigger and more shocking than she feared. Hidden deep in the forest she unearths a makeshift cemetery: a row of graves, each with a brightly coloured teddy bear.

Katie links the graves to a stack of missing-persons cases involving young girls—finding a pattern no one else has managed to see. Someone in Pine Valley has been taking the town’s daughters for years, and Katie is the only one who can stop them.

And then another little girl goes missing, snatched from the park near her home.

Katie’s still haunted by the friend she failed to protect, and she’ll do anything to stop the killer striking again—but can she find the little girl before it’s too late?

My rating: four stars out of five 

Katie is fresh home from Afghanistan, trying to settle back into civilian life, unsure what she will be doing. Before she left she was a policewoman, but she isn't sure she wants to go back there. In the meantime, she's working for her uncle, the sheriff of Pine Valley, California.

She somehow breaks wide open the case of two missing girls.

What follows is a twisty turning mystery.

At times it was a bit unbelievable and the ending felt a little unreal, but it was still a really good book. I plan on reading at least the next in this series. I love Katie and her amazing dog Cisco. Watching her rebuild relationships with the people that she grew up with is interesting.

Stand out quotes: 

“Places change all the time. People change. A way of life changes. You can’t freeze time or expect things to stay the same. They never will, no matter how hard you try to hold onto them.”

Relaxing was key at the moment the anxiety struck. You couldn’t fight it. You couldn’t reason with it. And it wouldn’t make you promises that it wouldn’t come back. Anxiety, you’re not welcome here anymore.

Light pushed away darkness. Light would ceaselessly drown the darkness at every opportunity if you knew where to look.

Although military training and police work have made an indelible impact on my life—my own personal defining moments—they still haven’t prepared me for the evil that lurks within the mind of a serial killer.

All American Boys

Rashad is absent again today.

That’s the sidewalk graffiti that started it all…

Well, no, actually, a lady tripping over Rashad at the store, making him drop a bag of chips, was what started it all. Because it didn’t matter what Rashad said next—that it was an accident, that he wasn’t stealing—the cop just kept pounding him. Over and over, pummeling him into the pavement. So then Rashad, an ROTC kid with mad art skills, was absent again…and again…stuck in a hospital room. Why? Because it looked like he was stealing. And he was a black kid in baggy clothes. So he must have been stealing.

And that’s how it started.

And that’s what Quinn, a white kid, saw. He saw his best friend’s older brother beating the daylights out of a classmate. At first Quinn doesn’t tell a soul…He’s not even sure he understands it. And does it matter? The whole thing was caught on camera, anyway. But when the school—and nation—start to divide on what happens, blame spreads like wildfire fed by ugly words like “racism” and “police brutality.” Quinn realizes he’s got to understand it, because, bystander or not, he’s a part of history. He just has to figure out what side of history that will be.

Rashad and Quinn—one black, one white, both American—face the unspeakable truth that racism and prejudice didn’t die after the civil rights movement. There’s a future at stake, a future where no one else will have to be absent because of police brutality. They just have to risk everything to change the world.

Cuz that’s how it can end.

This book takes you in alternating perspectives between Rashad and Quinn. I loved being able to be in both kids shoes (so to speak). To see how Rashad felt in the moments when this was happening to him. To see the situation as it happened from Quinn's point of view. Then the aftermath from both sides. Racism is something that is still very prevalent today and I think this book opens an important door to help us white people begin to understand some of the things the black community has been suffering with for a long time. I can tell you it has opened a dialogue with my children. 

The Last Dreamwalker

After her mother’s unexpected death, Layla Hurley must accept that their relationship was always distant and fraught. In the wake of her passing, Layla reconnects with the maternal side of her family—aunts she hasn’t been allowed to visit or speak to for years, and stories she’s never heard. She travels to South Carolina in search of closure, but discovers much more than she bargained for. While her mother harbored dark and disturbing secrets, there is also talk of her inheritance: a piece of land on the Gullah-Geechee island off the shore is now her own.

But Layla inherits more than land. A long-buried mysterious power, dropped through generations of her Gullah ancestors, awakens. Like many women before her, Layla is a dream-walker. She can inhabit and manipulate the dreams of others. As she dives into dark memories of her mother and the history of the island, she’s desperate to hold onto what’s real and untangle it from the looming dread that someone else, someone cloaked in malice, inhabits these dreams too.

No gift is without its consequences, and Layla finds herself thrust in the middle of a nightmare against an enemy that could snatch away her family and her life as she knows it.

While I received a copy of this audiobook in exchange for my review (via netgalley), all opinions remain my own.

Trigger warnings: slavery, racism, violence, mental health

I found this story to be quite compelling. It kept me listening long beyond when I should have turned it off. 

I wanted to know what was going to happen to Layla and her island. This story also goes back to the viewpoints of Layla's ancestors and you see how the island came to be theirs. The idea of dream-walking is something that I have always been fascinated with and this book just brought the idea to life. It is a new twist on a very old concept. One thing I also loved was the way the family related to each other. Felt like a real family dynamic. We aren't all like the classic TV family, this shows that we can still function, even if we aren't perfect.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.

With a foreward by Markus Zusak & interviews with Sherman Alexie and Ellen Forney

This was not what I was expecting. 

It was less a streamlined story and more of a collection of short stories about Alexie's life growing up. While it did seem to come together at the end, at the beginning it felt quite broken up. 

This is another that I wish I had the physical book copy, since it has illustrations, but it was still a good book. Interesting look at how the Native American people are still dealing with social injustice and prejudice. Alexie was great at reflecting his emotions into his writing, while at times I cried for him other times I actually laughed out loud. Definitely a good read to see life from another perspective.